What are some of the most interesting trends you’re seeing in the BI, analytics, and data warehousing space?

There are three trends that I believe are fundamentally changing the world of data.

The first is the shift to the cloud. Rapid provisioning, ease of use, and cost are just a few of the drivers as data gravity continues to shift.

(Data gravity means that when a large data set is sitting in a large Hadoop or Splunk instance in an on-premises system, it doesn’t make sense to load all that data into the cloud to run analytics functions. Instead, one would ship the function to the data and return results. Being able to do this seamlessly can greatly simplify integration pipelines.)

Also driving this trend is the fact that cloud data warehousing and analytics have moved from rogue departmental use cases to enterprise deployments.

The second trend is the data lake and how to complement, extend — and in some cases replace — the traditional data warehouse with a reference architecture that is built to handle all new and future sources and enable more proactive and predictive analytics.

The third trend is the Internet of Things (IoT). It’s already happening today in some industries with data velocity, variety, and, of course, volume. What’s more important, though, is the kinds of analytics and insights that will become possible because of IoT sensors, wearables, and devices — once organizations figure out how to separate signal from noise through the right data management techniques.

He was also asked about the drivers for modern integration platforms, whether you call it iPaaS or HIP or something else:

Andrew Bartels, former CIO, CTO and current Cloud consultant, guru and evangelist

Mike West outlined why “hybrid” (or highly interwoven) deployments are the new normal for enterprise IT. He reviewed how the coud is radically changing the role of enterprise IT and why data management must be a part of an overall cloud strategy. He identified 7 trends of the so-called Boundary Free Enterprise and pointed to these 5 best practices:

Andrew Bartels shared the story of how he led the transition at his company to “cloud first” and drove Salesforce adoption from a peripheral system to a key driver of business performance and success. Andrew spoke passionately about the need to treat data as an asseet and concluded with the following words of advice:

Cloud Services Becoming Foundational: “Through 2016, a hybrid model (cloud and captive systems) will become the platform of choice, a transitional platform en route to a future dominated by public and private clouds. By 2016, 75 percent or more of new enterprise spending will be cloud-based or hybrid according to Saugatuck’s research.”

And bringing it back to Cloud Master Data Management, Mike Vizard wrote about the concept of “Two-Tier MDM” noting: “as integration issues become more pressing in the cloud, IT organizations are once again going to discover many of the same MDM issues that have plagued their internal operations for so many years — only this time it will involve a lot more applications that they have less control over than ever.”

It seems we have we gone from a “SaaS spree” to “SaaS sprawl” and now finally to “SaaS sanity”?

Here are three brief videos that explain at a high-level how the key capabilities of a cloud master data management (MDM) solution can help deliver SaaS sanity:

“First, because Cloud solutions are creating a new strata of resources that are generating and utilizing important data that is being layered on top of that which is being produced by organizations’ legacy systems and software.

Second, the data being generated by Cloud solutions can be accessed real-time and aggregated across multiple sources.

Third, capitalizing on this data is an important part of maximizing the value of the Cloud. Therefore, creating effective Cloud data management capabilities is essential.”

Recently I presented on the topic of Salesforce data management at an Orlando user group called Dreamforce 2 You. We had a good discussion about some of the different data integration options available and I thought I would share a few of the slides. I’d be interested in your input and experiences.

Of course, I tend to be somewhat biased towards Informatica Cloud and the data integration as a service model….